They Found a Way to Charge You for Paying Rent on Time
A lawsuit says Entrata auto-enrolls renters in RentPlus, a $10-a-month credit-reporting fee, and pays landlords a cut to keep them in it.
A company called Entrata sells apartment landlords a product named RentPlus. RentPlus takes the rent you already pay, on time, every month, and reports it to the credit bureaus. For that, it charges you a monthly fee. Depending on the building it runs somewhere between about nine and fifteen dollars. The complaint puts the standard charge at $8.95 for a single renter and $14.95 for two or more. At a real building that fee lands right on the listing, an $8.95 line sitting next to the rent. Call it well over a hundred dollars a year to have someone tell Equifax you did the thing you already did.
Strange enough on its own. But the fee is the small part. The machine is who gets paid to put you in it.
The lawsuit calls it a kickback. The property manager who signs you up collects a cut of that monthly charge, every resident, every month. And Entrata does not leave the appeal to guesswork. The complaint points at the company’s own ROI calculator, the sales tool that shows an operator running 10,000 units could pull $576,000 a year off rent reporting, and more than $9 million over the full run of the pitch. Your landlord makes money when you carry the charge. That is the whole sell.
That is where the lawsuit comes in. A proposed class of tenants sued Entrata on June 1 in federal court in Colorado, a case called Fish v. Entrata, No. 1:26-cv-02416, brought by the nonprofit Towards Justice. The complaint says Entrata pays property managers to auto-enroll their tenants, and that RentPlus moved from opt-in to opt-out, a setup the suit calls a negative option. Saying nothing gets treated as saying yes. When a charge only survives if you cannot find the off switch, that tells you what the charge is.
And they built the off switch where you would not look for it. RentPlus gets folded into the lease as an amenity provided by the property. No pitch you can decline. You sign the lease to get the apartment, and the credit subscription rides along inside it, in the same slot as the gym you will never use and the valet trash you never asked for. A monthly charge dressed as a perk, built so that noticing it is your job and refunding it is a favor.
The thing you are buying is thinner than the brochure. RentPlus tells tenants that if you pay late, “we won’t report it,” so your credit is not hurt. Sounds generous. It also means the months you might actually want explained are the months it sits out. The suit says the whole product runs afoul of the Credit Repair Organizations Act, a law from the nineties built because credit-repair outfits have always billed people for outcomes they cannot promise. At affordable-housing properties the fee shows up cheaper, around $6.95 a resident. The model reaches hardest into the renters with the least room to take the hit.
Here is the part they say out loud. To you, RentPlus is sold as credit building. To the landlord, the complaint says, it is sold as ancillary revenue. And when Entrata filed to go public, rent reporting was right there in the S-1, listed among the services the company earns money on. So spare me the guessing game about motive. They wrote it into the filing they handed the SEC.
Then they took the check. Entrata took a $200 million investment from funds run by Blackstone in 2025, and this spring it filed to go public on the New York Stock Exchange. A few dollars a month feels like nothing. Multiply it across thousands of doors, every month, and it is the kind of quiet, recurring money that makes a software company shine on a stock exchange. Every auto-enrolled tenant is a coin in that machine, skimmed off a payment that was already going to happen. The renter is not the customer here. The renter is the yield.
Well, fuck that fee.
Here is what you can do, today, before you sign anything.
Read your lease for the words RentPlus, rent reporting, credit reporting, or resident amenity, and ask the leasing office, in writing, whether you are enrolled and what it costs. If you are in it and did not choose it, ask to opt out and ask for the refund. Some tenants report getting them. If you want your rent to build credit, there are services you sign up for directly, on your own terms, with no landlord skimming the fee.
Before the next lease, the move is the one it always is. Sort by total cost, not the sticker rent. The charge that gets you is almost never the number on the sign out front.
This is one fee on one lease. The building has a stack of others just like it, each one dressed as a perk.
Figures: Fish v. Entrata, No. 1:26-cv-02416, U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, complaint filed June 1, 2026, brought by Towards Justice. The complaint is the source for the product description, the $8.95 and $14.95 fee, the ROI calculator figures ($576,000 a year and about $9.6 million total for a 10,000-unit operator), the opt-in to opt-out negative option, the amenity framing, the marketing quote, and the Credit Repair Organizations Act claim. Real-world fee amounts ($8.95 and $6.95 at named buildings) come from public apartment listings and property disclosures, not an Entrata price sheet. The IPO and revenue-line details come from Entrata’s SEC Form S-1 and Reuters. The $200 million Blackstone investment is reported in an S-1 breakdown and should be confirmed against the original press release before print. No landlord or property manager is named as a defendant in this complaint. Only Entrata, Inc.
Related episode: Where Your Rent Goes
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